ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
Ecological predictors of interspecific variation in bird bill and leg lengths on a global scale.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Seasonal Elevational Migration Shapes Temperate Bird Community in the Gyirong Valley, Central Himalayas.Biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Shrinking body size under climate warming is not associated with selection for smaller individuals in a migratory bird.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Article
- Bill Length of Non-breeding Shorebirds Influences the Water Depth Preferences for Foraging in the West Coast of India.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Genomic Basis of Adaptive Divergence in Leg Length between Ground- and Tree-Dwelling Species within a Bird Family.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Ecological predictors of interspecific variation in bird bill and leg lengths on a global scale.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Bills and legs are two vital appendages for birds, and they exhibit huge interspecific variation in form and function, yet no study has examined the global predictors of this variation. This study examined global gradients in the relative lengths of bird bills and tarsi (i.e. exposed leg parts) to body size across non-migratory birds, while accounting for phylogeny. We found that relative bill length and tarsus length were related to diet, habitat density, latitude, annual mean temperature, temperature variability and hand-wing index (HWI), a proxy for birds' flight efficiency. Among these factors, diet played a primary role in predicting bill length, with nectar-feeding pollinators, vertivores, invertivores and omnivores having longer bills; HWI emerged as the predominant predictor of tarsus length, wherein species with higher HWI had shorter tarsi. However, the effects of these factors differed between passerines and non-passerines, with some temperature-related effects exhibiting opposite trends between these two groups. Our findings highlight the compromise in adaptations for feeding, thermoregulation and flight performance between the two distinct appendages.
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